PEP 350: Codetags

[Paul Rubin]

bokr at oz.net (Bengt Richter) writes:
> 2) In general, I think it might be good to meet Paul Rubin half way
> re convention vs syntax, but I don't think code tagging should be
> part of the language syntax per se. (-*- cookies -*- really are
> defacto source syntax that snuck in by disguise IMO) So perhaps a
> python command line option could invoke an "official" tool, with
> some more options passed to it to do various checking or extracting etc.

I think there should be a single tool that knows about as many of
these conventions as possible and warns about misuse, not a bunch of
different tools.  If there are a bunch of different tools, then
knowing which tools to use is yet another convention.  Conventions are
un-Pythonic IMO, since one of the goals of Python is that the
knowledge you need is supposed to be right there, not something you
have to absorb through a lot of different lore and PEP's.  Java has
some of the same disease, and I dislike Javadoc for about the same
reason.

Maybe the checking functions don't really belong in the
compiler/interpreter.  PyChecker might be a good home for them, if
it's made part of the distro.  There could be an interpreter flag to
invoke PyChecker automatically.